What is SquatConf?

Some of us are lucky enough to attend marvelous conventions, made with love by amazing people. Great events with top-notch speakers, incredible venues, and amazing parties.

These conferences are run with huge contributions from volunteers, and financial support from sponsors, providing top-notch events at affordable prices.

But even then, they're not affordable for everyone.

We're building an alternative model: SquatConf.

SquatConf won't be your everyday conference, but we'll have good talks from amazing people. It'll be donation-based, and you'll get to contribute if you want to.

How is this possible?

Conference costs are huge, and ticket prices are often nowhere near the true per-attendee cost, even for a non-profit conference.

Fancy venues, transportation, hotels and food are really nice perks to have, but…

If you hold a conference in a squat… the speakers advance their travel expenses… tell people to bring some food… and the wifi will be dodgy for sure…

You'll have a zero-cost conference made with love, but a little rougher around the edges.

Where and when?

November 15th 2014. A squat in Paris. For obvious reasons, we can't yet disclose where.

The Plan

We are a bunch of crazy programmers that believe in anarchy and decentralised systems, conferences included.

We will provide a space, we will provide a context, some talks, and the rest will be up to you…

Who is behind this?

The inception of SquatConf was at LXJS. It was a great conference, and the organisation did an amazing job, and after the final day of the event we ended up with dominictarr, joates and I talking about autonomous self-driving boats when this idea came to life. Now the idea matured and some folks (mmalecki, nathan7, no9, substack, ...) are in the loop now.

Okay, so you're a bunch of idealists, running a 10-people conference in a dump.

What you'll get out of SquatConf is in the end exactly what you put into SquatConf.

• Tickets will be donation-based. You want a cheap conference? Give us nothing. You want food? Contribute.
• This won't be a 400-people event, but do you need that many people?
• We already have speakers lined up you're probably prepared to pay for :)
• You have ideas for improvements? Suggestions are always welcome.
• We plan to make SquatConf zero-sum. We'll split any profits with attendees — ROI on a conference!

I want to give a talk!

Please see our talks repository to propose a talk.